


Unstoppable Forces and Immovable Objects

by warisaracket



Category: Touhou Project
Genre: F/F, Gen, ever-so-subtle malice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 13:26:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10594932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warisaracket/pseuds/warisaracket
Summary: Alice manages to get the better of Eirin without really trying, and shares her philosophy of politics.





	

For years and years there was no one she could talk to about it. There were, she believed, youkai that had been human in Gensokyo, but never in a context she could approach socially, and none of them were magicians in any case. Marisa had been sympathetic but couldn't relate on multiple levels. Talking with Patchouli had brought several unnerving revelations that had convinced her to join forces with Marisa and Hong on Operation Health and Wellness. 

Finally, there had been the day when a ship flew through the sky, and when it all settled down she had learned from Marisa over a long drunken night that it had all been an effort to rescue a nun-turned-magician from Makai. So as soon as she reasonably could she paid a visit to the new Myouren Temple. And Miss Byakuren Hijiri had been... helpful, she supposed. Certainly understanding. 

Anyways, Alice had worried that she had fundamentally failed in her transfiguration because she still slept, perchance to dream. Eating was one thing, for food and drink were pleasurable. But Alice had been plagued by nightmares since she had been a child, and yet she still felt the urge to sleep. Byakuren had told her that she still slept as well, and that habits of humanity like those were a good thing for a youkai to have, a recognition of the contingent relationships between humans and youkai. Alice was not particularly religious, but having reassurance from someone much, much older was fine. No help with the nightmares, of course. 

But she had drugs for that. 

Eirin Yagokoro was someone fundamentally untrustworthy, but her pride in her medicine outweighed any desire she had to poison youkai. So the Butterfly Dream Pill, offered at eminently reasonable rates (though she kept turning down Tewi's offer of a cheaper nasally-administered powder) became a part of her routine existence. Marisa alone felt comfortable joking about it with her, but Marisa would and could joke about anything. So it went, even after she had learned about the baku. After all, the baku's offer of guaranteed good dreams turned out to be coupled to customer satisfaction surveys.

All this is to say that Alice Margatroid changed into a nightgown, took her pill, set one of her Marisa dolls on the nightstand, and went to bed. 

And she found her dream of ocean waves and the seashore and a charming double-duel with a crab youkai and a shark youkai fading out, and now she was sitting at a table in a room with doors for walls, and the walls seeming to slide this way and that as she looked at them, and the table had the faintest impression of a face carved into the wood. The door behind her slid open, and she was running, throwing open door after door after door, turning down hall after hall after hall, the floor bucking and warping under her feet. Spiral, it's a spiral, she thought, and then she turned around another corner and the walls began to resemble stalks crowded together, and the ceiling was turning bright yellow and blue, and the floor slithered away and she was on dirt. And then she could hear the footsteps behind her and the sound of panting and drooling and the chase was on again. Here there was even less geometric sense, the ground tilting up and down and seemingly crossing over itself again and again and again and she had passed through this loop three times and the sunflowers were tilting down, nectar dripping and faces grinning, and the ground was suddenly squirming under her feet and bunching like a carpet, and then something broke.

And now she was sitting on the grass in a meadow, facing a woman with a parasol. Red gingham, green hair- "Hello, Yuuka," she managed. 

"Dear me," Yuuka said, in her perfectly colorless voice, "I must apologize for my rudeness, but as I was walking in dreams I ran into an obstacle and bulled my way through it. How careless of me!" 

Alice nodded to acknowledge the apology, and then blinked. "You ran into an obstacle?"

"Oh yes, quite the troublesome one. It attempted to halt me in my path completely, which would have been brave if it had had any life. But it was a totally dead thing. Were you responsible for it?"

Alice shrugged internally and explained about the pill. 

"My, my. That lunatic woman is quite the pharmacist. I haven't faced medicine like that for- oh, I forget how long. But what leads someone of your caliber to rely on such a thing?"

The space between them shortened, and Yuuka put her hand on Alice's arm. 

"It is simply unacceptable for someone who has overcome me to be in turn beholden to dreams. Tell me about the nightmares that plague you."

Alice delicately pulled Yuuka's hand off, and Yuuka's smile became a toothy grin. "From about the time I was five, I've dreamed of paralysis, of helplessness, of loss of control. Never on a consistent topic. One night it would be my dolls turning on me, another I would be locked in a slightly too-small cabinet, still another I'd be falling endlessly." 

Yuuka's grin shaded into a leer. "Hmm, hmm. And this before you exalted yourself, yes? And you were quite the little princess then, so I, Doctor Kazami, can preemptively rule out anxiety, I think."

Alice remained impassive, this being one of the best ways to deal with Yuuka if she saw you as an equal. 

"If I were to suspect anything, it would be a physical cause. After all, when you began to transform, you liberated your mind and your body from much of the weaknesses of the human corpus, but if you had a habit of uneven sleep before it would remain intact. Do you toss and turn?" Yuuka's eyes were alight with mischief. 

Alice said, "You know, I have no idea."

Yuuka looked surprised. "Really. You and that ever-so-ordinary magician never-"

"We don't talk about our sleep habits very often, no. And Marisa slept through falling off a radio tower once, so I doubt she'd notice even if I was punching and kicking her in my sleep."

"Well," Yuuka said, "I would look into that if I were you, and in the meantime, I will try to avoid dreaming of you, my sweet." 

And she was gone, and Alice had unmemorable dreams for the rest of the night, and an instinctive shudder when she woke up. 

The next day, just to be safe, she looked up ways to ward yourself from wandering dreamers, and bought a Sweet Dreams Pillow, and bought sunflower seeds and ostentatiously ate them outside the florist shop. And she considered whether she should consult with Eirin or find another doctor, or perhaps make a blanket to track how she slept. The doll tsukumogami came around the day after that and Alice gave her a gift for Yuuka. It was a little gardener doll with a little bit of dynamite concealed inside, already slightly sweaty. 

In faith, Alice had never really thought much of restricting yourself to stealing booze and deploying arcane insults, when a whiff of gunpowder would send a much clearer message.

**Author's Note:**

> At least some of the references in this fic are unintentional. 
> 
> I guess a sequel would involve Parsee denouncing Alice for abandoning her visits to the shrine at the hour of the ox, or the kind of arcane metamagical theory that interests maybe four people.


End file.
